“Don’t, please, don’t,” she whispered, then, changing her mind, went back to “Perdoname,” her song.
“Perdoname,” she said,
Si el miedo robó mi ilusión
Viniste a mi
No supe amar
Y sólo queda esta canción
I knew I’d never forget this. It’s the story of a man who, fearing love, chose to “protect his heart.” “You came to me but I didn’t know how to love, all I have now is this song,” he says. Was Clara speaking to me — or was this coincidence? Did I have Juan Dola, she asked? Who was Juan Dola? “One dollar! Really!” Feigned exasperation. I took one out and watched her push the same buttons on the jukebox. “One more time,” she said.
Is it me she’s dancing with?
It is me.
Why wasn’t there a thing about her I disliked?
“It’s a good thing I’m not your type and you’re not mine either,” she said, as we took our seat after the second dance.
I laughed at the maneuver.
“So, I’ll live with it. Let it be my hell.” I was trying to echo her words from last night.
I helped her with her coat. As she turned around and wrapped her shawl over her head, there was a fleeting moment when all we’d been saying seemed to come to a point. She hesitated. “So you’re not going to listen to me, are you?”
“Listen to what?” I was going to say, feigning once again not to have followed her drift for fear of admitting we were always, always on the same wavelength. Or I could have said, “You know I can’t, and I won’t.”
Instead, I ended up saying something so totally unlike me that it scared and enthralled me at once, as if I were suddenly wearing not my regular clothes but a soldier’s uniform, with saber, stars, medals, and epaulettes, but no boots and no undies. I liked being unlike me, hoped that this being unlike me was not an ephemeral visit to a costume ball or a day trip into an unknown landscape that would vanish as soon as my return ticket expired, but an indefinite voyage out that I had neglected to undertake all life long, and now its time had come. Being unlike me was being me. Except that I didn’t quite know how to yet. Perhaps this was why I’d been so tongue-tied with her; part of me was still discovering in erratic starts and sallies and in all manner of inadvertent ways, this unknown new character who had been waiting in the wings so long and who, for the first time in his life, was going to risk stepping up. Part of me didn’t know him yet, didn’t know how far to go with him. I was still trying him on for size, as if he were a new pair of shoes that I liked but wasn’t sure went along with the rest of me. Was I learning to walk all over again — learning to become human? What had I been all this time, then — a stilt walker? A reversible human?
It took me a second to realize that I was afraid of something else as welclass="underline" not just of growing to like this new me, of becoming totally attached to him, of giving him more and more slack and, with him, discovering all manner of new worlds, but of finding that he existed only in her presence, that she, and only she, could bring him out, and that I was like a genie without a master who recoils into his millennial spout, condemned to wait and wait for a chance to come out and see daylight when the next right person comes along from behind a Christmas tree and says her name is Clara. I did not want to grow attached to him and then find that he wouldn’t last longer than Cinderella’s livery. I was like someone who doesn’t speak French but who, in the presence of a Frenchwoman one evening, turns out to be the most loquacious French speaker, only to find that she’d gone back home the next morning and that, without her, he’ll never speak a word of French again.
The way she faced me with her wool shawl covering her ears and part of her face made me answer her warning with something uncharacteristically reckless.
“So, you’re really not going to listen to me, are you?” she asked.
“Don’t want to listen.”
“Doesn’t want to?”
“Doesn’t want to at all.”
This could easily have been our last moment together. “Just don’t fall in love with me, please!”
“Won’t fall in love with you, please.”
She looked at me, drew closer, and kissed me on the neck. “You smell good.”
“Walk home with me,” she said.
Outside the bar, it was snowing. A faint, quiet amber glow had fallen on Broadway, coating the dirty sidewalks of 105th Street with a sense of quiet joy that reminded me of the film we’d just seen and of Pascal’s own words: Joy, joy, joy. Traffic was scarce — buses and cabs, for the most part — while from a distance, as though emanating from neighborhoods far away, came the muffled metallic clang of a snowplow quietly plying its way downtown. She slipped her arm through mine. I had hoped she’d do just that. Was this just fellowship, then?
When we walked past the Korean twenty-four-hour fruit vendor, she said she wanted to buy cigarettes. “Read this,” she added, pointing to a misspelled sign that read TANGELINES and right next to it MERONS. She burst out laughing. “Just fancy how they’d spell blueberries and blood oranges,” she said, laughing louder and louder before the befuddled Mexican helper pruning flowers at this ungodly hour of the night. It scared me to think what she’d find about me the moment my back was turned. No, she’d do it to my face.
We reached her building sooner than I wanted. I decided there was no point in tarrying, and although I buttoned the last button of my winter coat to show that I was indeed heading into the cold after dropping her and was already bracing myself against the weather, she seemed to be trying to linger awhile longer as we stood outside, pointing to a view of the Hudson, finally saying that she would ask me upstairs but she knew herself and thought that perhaps we had better say good night now. We hugged — it was her idea, though the embrace seemed a bit too expansive to suggest anything more passionate or less chaste. I let the hug wane on its own. It was a friend’s or a sibling’s embrace, a feel-better gesture followed by a hasty send-off kiss on both cheeks. She lifted up my coat collar to cover my ears, staring me in the face, almost hesitating again, like a mother saying goodbye to a child who’ll probably have a terrible time on his first day at school. “You don’t mind?” she said, as though alluding to something we had been discussing earlier. I shook my head, wondering to myself how, even in saying as simple a thing as good night, she could still remain cryptic and explicit in one and the same breath.